The Avolites Discussion Forum

Simple question; I was wondering how you guys quickly create color bumps with an array of LED fixtures. Let's say you've got 50 LED PAR cans and you want to create a blue setting (could be every color offcourse) with a white chase going through the PARs. Creating a chase would be rather boring, and although the shape generator does help a lot it doesn't always seem to be ideal since you cannot really select a color it should use.

I mentioned this earlier in the feature request topic, but as I'm waiting for a good solution; I wonder how you do it in the meantime with what we've got in Titan 2.0?

You want them one by one in the next color? Make a chase, and try fixture overlap.

As mentioned, a two step chase will create this effect. First, set all your fixtures in blue, then record that as a step. Then, set all fixtures to white and record this as a step.

Go into edit times, then change the fixture overlap, the closer to 100, the smoother the wave across, the closer to 0, the more snappy the wave.

Make sure you select the fixtures in the order you want the wave to playback, say left to right. This is most easily done with a group, as when you record the group it will save the order in which you selected the fixtures.

In this way you can create your own custom colour/dimmer/position etc shapes, by setting the start and end point with steps of the chase.

While using overlap certainly takes the pain out of the chase creation it still requires a chase for every occasion which is often simply not practical. (Like we had to do before v-dim...!)

For the consummate busker the shape gen can help. Or at least in the example of bumping to white (or indeed black). I was sure we'd covered this already??

Thanks to the fact that the Titan shapefile allows pattern offsets from -256 to +255 it is always possible to reach the minimum or maximum value from any origin. So a shape that applies a pattern ranging from zero to +255 on all three colour components will give white at max size from any base colour. Similarly a pattern ranging from zero to -256 will give black. There is nothing stopping you defining shapes that apply such patterns to individual components too. These patterns could be snapping/fading/ramp etc.

I find these sort of 'positive' and 'negative' only patterns are very useful and I've added a large number to my shapefile.


Some examples:
(for reference. I don't recommend copy/paste)

Hey Nic,

could be that I missed out on that one, but I don't think I've seen it before. I think I can make this work on my fixtures and I also see some possibilities for CMY shapes with the same behaviour.

If I understand you correctly, the same pattern but with all values negative would give me the same but then down to zero?

As for the other solution of the two step chase: great! I havent been playing around with fixture overlap that much, but I surely should do so; loads of possibilities there! Thanks

Yes, negative gets to zero from any origin. This is the solution for white in CMY.

Those overlap tricks work especially well with large numbers of fixtures. Have a play in Vis.

Well I guess it's off to building shape files again

Do you remember my rain shape? Is it possible to create that one at once instead of overlapping two shapes with exactly the same speed?

No. Unfortunately the shapefile still limits only one pattern per shape, despite how it looks in the syntax.

Damnit!